In advertising marketing campaigns, printed materials are sent to end recipients. Print shops use data provided by their customers to create the printed materials. Print shops traditionally internalize most tasks involved in the processing of the data provided by the customers and the printing of the printed materials. The print shops may suffer from inefficiencies when performing tasks outside of their core business practice of operating printing presses and printers.
The printed materials for a given job are traditionally prepared by a single print shop. Print shops that do not possess all the equipment necessary to prepare the printed materials in the manner specified by the customer are not able to receive some jobs because they cannot perform all the operations necessary to complete the job.
Print shops may be provided with unsecured customer data that is utilized in the printing of the printed material. This may lead to situations where print shops compromise the security of their customer's proprietary data.